Jailbreak

Cydia

If you do a lot of typing on your iPhone, and chances are that you do, then you may want to take a peek at a new jailbreak tweak called exKey by iOS developer Richard Cheng. The tweak adds a new row of keys to the top of the keyboard to make accessing common characters easier.

ExKey makes the keyboard feel more like a computer keyboard by putting a row of numbers at the top of the keyboard when viewing the letters, but when viewing the alternative characters keyboard that includes numbers and some alternative characters, the tweak puts some additional commonly-used characters at the top row of the keyboard.

Because exKey brings a new row of relevant keys to the keyboard no matter what keyboard view you might be looking at, it makes typing easier in some cases. You won't have to switch back and forth so much between one keyboard view to another keyboard view when using exKey, and this will cut down on time usage too.

Notably, there are some caveats. The tweak is not compatible with any iPads, only iPhone and iPod touch. Additionally, there is a known conflict with PredictiveKeyboard, so you shouldn't install both at the same time. On the other hand, exKey is compatible with all iOS version 5.0 and later. The tweak has no options to configure.

If you want to give exKey a try to improve your typing time efficiency and convenience, you can grab it for 99¢ from Cydia's BigBoss repository.